Physics has become littered with oversimplifications that predate relativity and quantum mechanics, impeding potentially productive directions for explanation. This doesn't mean most of what we think we know is wrong, just sometimes unexpectedly incomplete.

The linked Facebook post illustrates emergence at a couple of levels: growing evidence that pilot waves play a role in the microstructure and the ability of Fb to bring both otherwise unrelated links together. As a comment on the original link to the EM Drive paper acceptance, I obsessed:

The human obsession with binary opposition strikes again, this time over more than a century since the aether hypothesis was rejected outright rather than refined and the never productive concept of empty Cartesian space substituted. Unsurprising that this comes at the same time as other evidence that the more superfluid like vacuum does carry pilot waves. My bottom up view from cellular automata has made it inescapable that the microstructure has to be at least that complex, Occam's razor be damned. None of that requires discarding the many useful results of science and engineering, just reemphasises the need to treat cautiously any heavily invested old professor's insistence that something is impossible.

Laszlo's Evolution: The Grand Synthesis was a key early step on my journey to an emergent perspective on the world. I wouldn't use the words he uses here but understand they might have wider appeal and certainly agree with his general thrust.

Quantum effects are not just subatomic: they can be expressed across galaxies, and solve the puzzle of dark matter

Tony Smith's insight:

Scientific silos are bedevilled with ancient assumptions that do not stand up well to reexamination in the light of exponentially increasing knowledge. This is just one in a direction I've been expecting for quite a while, an idea that dark matter is not localised in the same way as our very successful particle models of light matter's elementary constituents.

Ordered Graeber's latest book as one more likely candidate for much needed list of references which save having to write too much from scratch. Appears to fit the spirit of Charles C Scott's Seeing Like a State and the Occupy Movement, both powerful illustrations of social emergence.

One of a pair of articles in The Conversation today which show the complex emergence underpinning condensed matter structure at opposite ends of the spatial scale. This one in particular only adds to my concern about the degree to which we defer to crude verbal (and numerical) mapping* when dabbling with the fate of our incomparably more complex and likely unparalleled biosphere. *lawyers (and accountants/economists)

"The concept of stigmergy has been used to analyze self-organizing activities in an ever-widening range of domains, from social insects via robotics and social media to human society. Yet, it is still poorly understood, and as such its full power remains underappreciated. The present paper clarifies the issue by defining stigmergy as a mechanism of indirect coordination in which the trace left by an action in a medium stimulates a subsequent action. It then analyses the fundamental components of the definition: action, agent, medium, trace and coordination. Stigmergy enables complex, coordinated activity without any need for planning, control, communication, simultaneous presence, or even mutual awareness. This makes the concept applicable to a very broad variety of cases, from chemical reactions to individual cognition and Internet-supported collaboration in Wikipedia.

Maybe the issues cities like Melbourne have providing infrastructure to serve developer-led growth suggests a limit to what can be achieved without more widely grounded strategic planning taken out of the hands of politically volatile interests.

Great short summary appropriately looking forward on 45th anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos rather than backwards. Getting this into more heads remains my motivating challenge more than a quarter century after I found the first clues.

Results show that putting too much effort into controlling such systems may actually make them uncontrollable

Tony Smith's insight:

While this article is largely yet another angle of "discovery" of principles some of us already know all too well, the comment by "postfuture" exposes the way our "business as usual" habits (competitive growth imperatives) produce systems that are particularly prone to runaway effects.

Multiway whammy. Santa Fe research confirms non-linear characteristics of cities due to network effects from increasing social interactions, citing much earlier work of Jane Jacobs who successfully opposed the Lower Manhattan Expressway, originally proposed in 1941 and cancelled in 1962 in the face of community opposition.

Anyone questioning our positioning of Napthine, Mulder and their Dividing Melbourne brief as 1950s throwbacks needs to swallow the obvious close parallels.

To me this is a "Duh!" article—so obvious it shouldn't need to be written. But reality is that it is kicking against the cultural heritage which almost disables evolutionary theory and so has to be argued in narrow passages. Even Galapagos finches make it painfully clear that behavioural change precedes genetic adaptation. Variation is never random, it is exploring possibilities and latching onto those that work. This should not even be news, but it still is. Damn Descartes et al. And double damn primatological chauvanism.

Seeing more and more interconnections between Emergence/Systems/Complexity theory, the old ally knowledge management, and a seemingly newer one: the foresight approach to futures studies. Of course they all have strong histories back to the 1980s and earlier hints, but they seem to now be attractive to the same members of a less elderly generation. Also see connections to Transhumanism and Postmodernism but these may not be as welcome in overly polite/conservative circles.

In the 1990s an unusual encounter took place in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In plant rituals, shamans of the Achuar, a tribe living in pristine forest that had never been in touch with Western civilization, received the warning that the “white man” would try to invade their lands, c

While we look to broaden the understanding of Emergence and Supervenience in the evolution of the world we find ourselves in at every level from the cosmological to the social, many remain driven by the need for better ways to live and work together in a world recovering from the worst excesses of late stage capitalism and its dependence on fear and resurgent authoritarianism. With its thin veneer of romanticisation stripped away, this article is a useful short summary of that struggle.

(An alternate version of this article was originally published in the Boston Globe)

Tony Smith's insight:

This is one of the further consequences my Connecting Dots program is likely leading towards, unless we hit clear evidence to the contrary. It is certainly going to come as a shock to the political class for whom Jobs Jobs Jobs has become the most redundant three word slogan. Adds to the argument for basic income to be normalised ahead of the rich deciding robots Trump the rest of us.

We had been invited to hold a workshop at the Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. It was within an AIESEC event, the Youth To Business Forum, focusing on youth and the new world of work. I was definitely going to catch this chance of dancing with young, thirsty and vivid brains. I always love to. And I was going to share the wave with a good friend and colleague of mine, such as Michele Luconi.As it often happens we had not talked about what to say that day, let alone what to do. And the day had arrived. Michele sent me a message via whatsapp, I called him and went: “Mike, I have the ti

Tony Smith's insight:

Good to see a younger generation becoming more aware that complexity and emergence are everywhere and the main thing we have to work and play with going forward. Been using waves as key metaphor for years.

What happens to a galaxy when it runs out of the stuff needed to forge new stars?

Tony Smith's insight:

One of a pair of articles in The Conversation today which show the complex emergence underpinning condensed matter structure at opposite ends of the spatial scale. This further narrows the window of Goldilocks conditions that makes it increasingly likely that our particular history gives us opportunity and responsibility to do something commensurate with being the only moment and place where it is possible to know the universe, while amplifying the import of the weak anthropic principle to that knowing.

Since the reclassification of all life forms in three Domains (Archaea, Bacteria, Eukarya), the identity of their alleged forerunner (Last Universal Common Ancestor or LUCA) has been the subject of extensive controversies: progenote or already complex organism, prokaryote or protoeukaryote, thermophile or mesophile, product of a protracted progression from simple replicators to complex cells or born in the cradle of "catalytically closed" entities? We present a critical survey of the topic and suggest a scenario.

Tony Smith's insight:

I've long contended that Darwinian selection in relative isolation tends to increase efficiency at what a species is already doing, not innovate.* Gianedorff et al's invocation of "reductive evolution" is consistent and paints a scenario for accelerating research identifying viable paths through the definitive problem for Emergence: the origin of life itself. *See my 20 year old: http://www.meme.com.au/theoria/metaselection.html

Limits on fundamental limits to computation Nature.com A speedup from runtime polynomial in n to approximately logn can be achieved in an abstract model of computation for matrix multiplication and fast Fourier transforms.

Tony Smith's insight:

While such limits to computation in our emergent substrate (aka matter) do not deny the hypothesis that the most fundamental processes can be seen as computation (c.f. Wolfram) the existence of hard limits as reported here places a potent limit on the possibility of modelling candidate (Planck scale) processes which underpin our finest grain observables (always mediated by photons).

'The Embarrassment of Complexity' is what unavoidably happens as silos which have externalised more than they sustainably can try to reconnect to tackle real world issues through oversimplified interfaces which ignore non-linearity and worse.

Tony Smith's insight:

Just when I was starting to enjoy my notional retirement: "This is why what I call competent rebels are needed everywhere: individuals who are able to combine professional capabilities with the fresh, challenging outlook required for progress."

This chapter reviews measures of emergence, self-organization, complexity,homeostasis, and autopoiesis based on information theory. These measures arederived from proposed axioms and tested in two case studies: random Booleannetworks and an Arctic lake ecosystem.Emergence is defined as the information a system or process produces.Self-organization is defined as the opposite of emergence, while complexity isdefined as the balance between emergence and self-organization. Homeostasisreflects the stability of a system. Autopoiesis is defined as the ratio betweenthe complexity of a system and the complexity of its environment. The proposedmeasures can be applied at different scales, which can be studied withmulti-scale profiles.

Regardless of any questions as to the degree information-theoretic metrics are useful and useable at the core of Emergence/Systems/Complexity theory, Fernandez, Maldonado & Gershenson's paper provides a valuable discussion of fundamental concepts across the field. The paper's key claim is that complexity is high not just when there is a balance between order and chaos, an old oversimplification, but also between emergence (in the whole of information not defined in the parts) and self-organisation, each of which is seen more widely as symptomatic of complexity. It is not an entirely unfamilar argument but one easily hidden in the field's Babel-like language.

Lee Smolin is closer to being right about cosmology, i.e. asking the right questions, than anyone else half as prominent. As usual, Edge provides a good platform for expounding ideas and eliciting informed responses, albeit some that are a bit too welded on.

Bogota, Colombia is growing "like a pancake," as Rodrigo Nino, real-estate pioneer, says in the video below. Like other cities around the world, as the population quickly expands, Bogota is expanding outward.

Tony Smith's insight:

This is how people of good will colaboratively escape unintentional strangulation by resurgent government authoritarianism aka administrivial empire building. (Not the only optimistic story to come out of Latin America this morning.)

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